Academic literature on the topic 'Steamboats and steamships'

Images of Volga steamships take an important place in the works of Eugene Chirikov (1864–1932) written by him both before the Revolution 1917 and in exile.The writer’s attention and love for this type of water transport is explained not only by his biography (Chirikov was born and grоwn up on the banks of the Volga, traveled a lot along it, etc.), but also by his assuarance in the special role of the Volga the main waterway of Russia that playing a great role in the fate of the country and people. Therefore, the steamer in Chirikov’s prose appears as a kind of spiritual center, and among its passengers, the greatest interest of the author is caused by pilgrims and pilgrims from the peasant environment, whose prayers, spiritual disputes, songs, legends and legends reflect, according to the writer, the aspiration of the national consciousness to the “Truth of God”. They are opposed to the “pure public” from the 1st class, the description of which reflects not only the author’s critical view of the unfair, in his opinion, social structure of modern society, but also his anxiety caused by the loss of a living religious feeling and spiritual and moral ideals by representatives of the upper strata, without which as history has shown the existence of Russia itself is impossible.

In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, steamships plied the Lower Colorado River from the Gulf of Mexico to the present site of Hoover Dam. They were instrumental in fortifying southern Arizona and southeastern California, displacing the region's native inhabitants, facilitating westward migration, and appraising the terrain. During these years, steamship owners, operators, and passengers announced, enforced, and negotiated peripheral conflicts attending continental expansion. The Colorado River demarked a line of sovereignty and a line of defense, as well as a line of commerce. The relatively unexplored history of steamship navigation consequently illuminates the river's role in solidifying and regulating the borderlands, and, more significantly, its centrality to the river's larger narrative.

This paper explores the social dimension of cruising by looking at new forms of sociality created by the advent of steamboats along the Danube and in the Black Sea. Since a Viennese steamship company introduced cruises between Vienna and Istanbul in the mid-1830s, Austrian steamboats became a busy stage of diverse social encounters. The idea of ships as “floating spaces”, “historical arenas” or “contact zones” in which different cultures meet has been developed by scholars for a long time. Framed within the new mobilities paradigm, this paper details a large range of social interactions on board Austrian steamers based on the accounts of more than a dozen travellers who plied along the Vienna–Istanbul route in the mid-1830s to the mid-1850s. With sociality as an integral part of modern transportation, this paper analyses the early phases in the industrialisation and commodification of travelling and focuses on the social experiences that steamboat cruising provided to customers.

In the spring of 1827 the splendidly appointed steamship Albany slid for the first time into the waters of the Hudson River to begin what proved to be an eighteen-year career of commercial travel on that busy waterway. Two years earlier the opening of New York's Erie Canal linking Albany to its western sister city, Buffalo, had enhanced the already flourishing steamboat commerce on the Hudson, for that mighty river then became the principal access to the great westward water route that terminated with the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

The study gives a new outlook on the activities of the first Tyumen printing house, which was founded by K. N. Vysotsky in 1869 and existed until 1909. The scientific novelty of the research is due to the following: 1) book publishing is considered as part of the media revolution carried out by K. N. Vysotsky thanks to the opening of the first photography studio (1866), lithography studio (1867), printing house (1869), and a newspaper publishing news and advertisements (1879) in a provincial Siberian town; 2) publishing activities of K. N. Vysotsky and L. K. Vysotskaya are linked with the history of Siberian steam navigation in the 1870–1890s. The purpose of the article is to characterize Russian dorozhniki - itinerary books as a special type of publications in the Vysotskys’ printing house, to identify their diversity and role in the activities of steamship companies, in particular the Kurbatov and Ignatov Partnership. A bibliological analysis based on the structural-typological method within the context and system approaches allows a new interpretation of the role and place of the Vysotskys’ printing house in the history of Siberian book culture. The author comes to the conclusions that about 20% of the repertoire (11 of 56 books) of the Vysotskys’ printing house are books about steamboats and rivers. They represent a semantic unity, a unique series structured by space (more than 3000 km along West Siberian rivers from Tyumen to Tomsk) and the idea of industrialization and cultural development of new lands. The structural dominance of the series belongs to a special publication type: dorozhnik (an itinerary book), the purpose of which was to indicate the distance between settlements and to serve as a travel guide on Siberian rivers. Publication of such books, which are known to exist since the ancient Rome, testifies to the high print culture of the Vysotskys publishers. These books are very diverse: brief guidebooks coexisted with lithographic cartographic editions and advertising catalogs in the genre of history writing and ethnographic travel essays. The significance of the itinerary books published by the Vysotskys lies in the cultural brand they formed for Tyumen as a town and the birthplace of all navigation along West Siberian rivers.

Russia’s Baltic provinces and Finland differed from Russia’s interior areas due to their long coastline. On the one hand, it helped to connect those areas, but on the other hand, the Baltic Sea played a crucial role in connecting Russia to Europe. In 1837–70, 16 passenger steamboat routes had been established that called at Estonian ports. Due to Estonia’s geographical position, entrepreneurs from Turku, Riga and St Petersburg as well as from Tallinn operated those lines. With the exception of studies on migration policies, the roles of institutions and legislation have not been addressed in depth in maritime history studies. Therefore this article focuses on the following questions: how legislation impacted the establishment of steamboat companies, and how the state organised steamboat traffic. Steamship companies were the first transportation organisations to operate as joint-stock enterprises. Joint-stock laws started developing in Russia in the first decades of the 19th century. The first legislation regulating steamship companies that operated between Baltic Sea ports was adopted in 1835. A comprehensive act regulating all joint-stock companies followed in 1836. According to the 1836 law, which was in force until 1917, the establishment of a joint-stock company depended a great deal on the state. Both the tsar and the Ministry of Finance had to approve the company statutes. Both had the right to make changes in the statute’s clauses or in proposals for capital formation. The Grand Duchy of Finland followed its own separate path. Joint-stock companies in Finland were exempted from this legislation until 1864 because Finland adhered to the Swedish Law of Entrepreneurship and Shipping from the 18th century. Due to those circumstances, personal relations and the company’s own contribution played a key role in joint-stock companies. Statutes approved by the Ministry of Finance and the tsar provided companies with the opportunity to apply for benefits and prerogatives like tax relief or monopoly rights for certain routes for fixed time periods. Such various supportive measures were highlighted to foster the development of steamship connections on routes of national importance. The state could take part in the establishment process as well, as the case of the Osilia steamship company demonstrates. In cases where there was insufficient establishing capital, and to encourage the establishment of companies, the state bought a certain number of stocks in the company. Russian merchant shipping legislation and organisation was introduced for the first time in contemporary Estonia at the beginning of the 18th century after the Great Northern War, whereby Estonian territory was incorporated into Russia. The organisation of both merchant and passenger shipping was divided between different authorities in Russia. The aim of establishment ministries in the first decade of the 19th century was to set up a system where tasks were clearly divided and unambiguous. In reality, this goal was not put into practice for the whole system. Hence merchant shipping was still divided between the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of the Navy, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in addition local authorities. Local authorities became the link between the companies and state authorities because they were familiar with local circumstances and could provide consultative information.

Abstract The diaries of Joseph Mathia Svoboda capture over 40 years of trade on the Tigris, describing his daily life and regular journeys as a steamboat purser during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, specifically between the cities of Basra and Baghdad. They offer a unique perspective on daily life, community structure, and social relations. However, with over 600 pages of transcribed material and many more diaries still in the process of being transcribed, it is difficult to track patterns and changes in Joseph Svoboda’s social relationships and daily life by way of reading and inference alone. This article employs natural language processing (NLP) and network analysis to facilitate study of Svoboda’s social interactions, as well as his observations of his broader social milieu. Inspection of the networks and accompanying visualizations showed that Svoboda’s close interactions were primarily with kin, but his position as a steamship purser gave him a unique vantage point to encounter a wide range of persons of diverse backgrounds. Additionally, decomposing networks by time illustrated how significant life events facilitated change in social interactions.

This chapter explores the impact of the early steamboat in North Wales, a region underexplored by maritime historians in regard to steam technology. It concentrates on period between 1817 and the 1840s. It begins by considering the comparatively small number of registered steamboats in North Wales and offers reasons why - the small population of towns and the rural environment are particular factors of note. It then expands out to examine steamboat services in the rest of Britain in comparison. It explores the geographical problems of establishing steamships in Wales, plus the successes and failures of several routes. The Holyhead-Dublin route is given significant attention, as it became a major communication route between Britain and Ireland. Finally, it studies the impact of the steamship on Welsh communities, and finds that it created an economic boost and provided wider access to technology, news, information, and passengers. Furthermore, livestock farming, retail trade, and the tourist industry all developed significantly in North Wales due to the presence of the steamship.

This final chapter considers the engineering and building work involved in the construction of early steamships, using a list of steamboats built between 1811 and 1822 that the authors discovered in British Parliamentary papers. It is divided into five sections. The first explores the source and the possible reasons it has been neglected by historians, and compares it to other contemporary sources to determine its validity. The second explores tonnage and horsepower figures to establish reflective trends. The third explores hull building and the skills and materials necessary, plus the location of their shipyards and the men who worked there. The fourth does the same for engine building, a separate activity requiring different skillsets and materials altogether. The authors highlight that this source is the first to demonstrate the division between hull and engine construction.The fifth section places the findings into context through an exploration of innovation dispersal. The conclusion applies the findings to a wider and long term context, suggesting that the tremendous rate of technological advance in steamships meant that high standards and specialisation became extremely valuable in a very short space of time.